4 ms·

Seems like a lot of pent-up demand. What are the practical applications of something like this?

visionscaper 14y ago
Personally I see a killer application of (clusters of) parallella boards in machine perception for e.g. robotics and information retrieval/websearch. When I talk about Machine perception it could, for instance, refer to advanced visual object detection, recognition and tracking combined with pattern recognition on other sensory modalities such audio and haptics. To make high computing power portable, as could be needed for machine perception applications in robotics, high power efficiency is needed. This is something the Parallella is aiming for. Machine perception algorithms using "brain-like" computation structures are not only highly parallel by nature but also need fast access to memory. Instead of having a thin pipe to a central memory, it needs to be distributed, build close to/in to the computation cores. The long-term vision of Parallella’s Epiphany multi-core processors indicate a 1000 cores per processor, with 128KB memory per core by 2014 a possibility(!) This is exactly the order of parallelism and distributed memory Machine perception applications need.
mikepurvis 14y ago
As visionscaper says, a lot of applications in vision and robotics, but I believe the incredible low power consumption offers broad potential in portable electronics, and also the datacenter. Imagine running an Erlang app on a single box crammed with thousands of these cores and a few TB of RAM. They understand that the key is getting developers writing software in a new way, and the trick there is ubiquitous hardware. They also understand that it has to start as a co-processor, too, so they've married it to an existing ARM chip to provide peripherals and the host operating system. These decisions are very, very good ones, especially as compared to other multicore processor manufacturers (XMOS and GreenArrays are the two I'm thinking of).
jws 14y ago
Mine will be using a digital radio front end to simultaneously decode a large number of frequencies and monitor them for content.
hn_is_vile 14y ago
Signal processing immediately comes to mind, and that is the use I am planning to put the chip towards. An associate of mine has developed a new method for signal decomposition on non-linear signals which FFT is not suitable for, and which is able to split the processing into parallel streams of processing. Because the chip consume so little power, you will be able to build high performance processing into a small portable box that can run on batteries or USB (depending on how power efficient the final chip is, but they are currently talking about 2 watts).

Personally I see a killer application of (clusters of) parallella boards in machine perception for e.g. robotics and information retrieval/websearch. When I talk about Machine perception it could, for instance, refer to advanced visual object detection, recognition and tracking combined with pattern recognition on other sensory modalities such audio and haptics. To make high computing power portable, as could be needed for machine perception applications in robotics, high power efficiency is needed. This is something the Parallella is aiming for. Machine perception algorithms using "brain-like" computation structures are not only highly parallel by nature but also need fast access to memory. Instead of having a thin pipe to a central memory, it needs to be distributed, build close to/in to the computation cores. The long-term vision of Parallella’s Epiphany multi-core processors indicate a 1000 cores per processor, with 128KB memory per core by 2014 a possibility(!) This is exactly the order of parallelism and distributed memory Machine perception applications need.

mikepurvis 14y ago

As visionscaper says, a lot of applications in vision and robotics, but I believe the incredible low power consumption offers broad potential in portable electronics, and also the datacenter. Imagine running an Erlang app on a single box crammed with thousands of these cores and a few TB of RAM. They understand that the key is getting developers writing software in a new way, and the trick there is ubiquitous hardware. They also understand that it has to start as a co-processor, too, so they've married it to an existing ARM chip to provide peripherals and the host operating system. These decisions are very, very good ones, especially as compared to other multicore processor manufacturers (XMOS and GreenArrays are the two I'm thinking of).

jws 14y ago

Mine will be using a digital radio front end to simultaneously decode a large number of frequencies and monitor them for content.

hn_is_vile 14y ago

Signal processing immediately comes to mind, and that is the use I am planning to put the chip towards. An associate of mine has developed a new method for signal decomposition on non-linear signals which FFT is not suitable for, and which is able to split the processing into parallel streams of processing. Because the chip consume so little power, you will be able to build high performance processing into a small portable box that can run on batteries or USB (depending on how power efficient the final chip is, but they are currently talking about 2 watts).